Cisco's data center deluge

Cisco rolled out sweeping extensions to its data center portfolio, including new servers, fabric extenders, SAN switches and more

Two new Nexus fabric extenders – the 2232 and 2248 – support lower and higher bandwidth requirements than the first generation Nexus 2148, which addressed Gigabit Ethernet applications. The 2232 supports 32 10Gbps/Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet ports for connecting servers to Nexus 5000 switches; while the 2248 sports 48 10/100Mbps ports.

Cisco this week rolled out a range of data center product enhancements and extensions, including new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers; Nexus 2000 fabric extenders; MDS 9000 series SAN switches; and an appliance that incorporates its Nexus 1000 virtual switch.

The new UCS blade and rack servers are based on Intel's Xeon 7500 processor. They support Cisco's FEXlink architecture for extending switching fabrics closer to the server rack, resulting in a 4x bandwidth increase – 160Gbps – over first generation UCS servers. It also features 50% more Fibre Channel bandwidth and 4x compute capacity than the first generation servers.

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